To begin you need to think of what it is exactly that you want to photograph be it wildlife, sports, portraits, landscapes or a mixture. From there you can work what equipment to get.
Equipment:
You need to decide Canon or Nikon these are your best two choices. Forget the rest.
Starting out does not have to be expensive you will need a body, lens and a memory card. Look for second hand models on eBay or gumtree.com in your local area. They are much cheaper than new models and have all the basic features an amateur might use. Try and get a used body without a lens as the kit lenses it seems are of a lower quality
Once decided on a body you will need a lens
Again second hand is your best bet Tamron and Sigma are cheap and produce good quality lenses
Types of lenses:
Telephoto - these are zoom lenses, every lens will have mm on the side the is the distance that the lens can zoom, telephoto lenses start at around 50mm and go all the way up to 600mm. As a beginner aim for a 50-200mm or 75-300mm lens. They get progressively expensive and you get diminishing benefits from the lens and the mm increase e.g. It is much less of a jump from 100mm to 200mm that 50mm to 100mm. 50mm is that the human eye can see if this helps to give you a sense of scale.
Macro - These lenses are for magnifying close up subjects. A good macro lens will usually magnify in the ratio of 1:2 . The same Zoom principal applies.
Landscape or wide angle lenses - take light in from more angles, this creates a panoramic view.
Ensure you get at least a 1gb Compact flash card
Principals
One you have you camera and lens you will read through the manual and be baffled by terms here are a few to get you started
ISO - the is the sensitivity of the film to light, the higher the more sensitive but this can make the pictures noisy
Aperture - this is the size of the whole and how much light it lets in low is the widest high numbers means less light
Shutter speed - the faster the speed the less light that is taken in
Exposure - The Shutter speed and the aperture affect the exposure, too much light the photo is overexposed whites out. Too little and its black
WB - white balance is the camera in built colour adjustment need to be set correctly according to conditions.
I hope that with this knowledge you can go on the take much better photos that you did with your old camera
forget the rest, as in you personally do not like them? If i was a new photographer i would be like oh...well ishould NEVER use another brand. Which is not true at all.